Causes and Effects of Small-Scale Spatial Structure in Plant Populations

Small-scale spatial structure is important in plant ecology. Plants interact primarily with their immediate neighbors and the view of the community as seen by an individual plant can be quite different from large-scale spatial average. We describe a spatial statistic that captures the plant's-eye view and use it to illustrate the strong spatial structure present in a grassland community. Many processes affect small-scale spatial structure, including intraspecific competition, dispersal of propagules, interactions with other species and the spatial structure of the environment. Spatial structure in turn affects the the vital processes of growth, birth and death; the dynamics of plant communities thus involve a coupling of spatial structure and the vital processes. We describe recent work towards making this coupling explicit by means of individual-based models and the dynamics of spatial moments.

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